Tag Archives: Pierre

Marie-Noelle Pourtois and husband Pierre-Alex Carlier, the chief brewers at Blaugies clearly don’t do things by half. Back during my review of La Moneuse (#65) I commented on the morality of a family brewery such as this naming a beer after a notorious womanising murdering highwayman. Well, the Darbyste then is clearly the redemption beer – John Darby after which the beer gains its name was a temperance-preaching minister!

John Nelson Darby is as unlikely an inspiration for a beer as the marauding highwayman Antoine-Joseph Moneuse. He was born in 1800 in London but spent his formative years in the Republic of Ireland. He was primarily known for his travels around Europe with his ‘brethren’, where he spread the word of Jesus Christ as the direct leader of the Church. They preached that Jesus Christ needed no human intermediary on earth, and he went as far as coining the theory of ‘dispensationalism’ (a precursor to the doctrine now very influential amongst fundamental Christian Zionists in modern day America) – that Christ would return at the end of time at Armageddon where good and evil will ultimately confront each other. True believers will be saved, and the unbelievers will face eternal damnation. Good vs evil. La Moneuse vs Darbyste? Could the final battle of time take place in a small farmyard brewery on the Belgian-French border? Now that would be a blog and a half to write!

It is probably highly unlikely as there is actually a rather less symbolic reason for this particular beer being named after the preacherman, and this stems from the low strength brew that Darby promoted amongst his parishioners and workers which was made from fig-juice. Miners in particular were much more likely to return home to their wives in the evening if they weren’t consuming Belgian tripels at 9% and John Nelson Darby had the best intentions for his folk. This clearly inspired the brewers at Blaugies who have recreated the use of figs in this beer primarily to be used as the fermentable material.

The Darbyste, like the Saison de l’Epeautre is a saison style beer made with wheat and then fermented with the figs. It is a particularly dry beer, with plenty of citrus flavours although there is little evidence of much figginess in the taste. It is a beautiful looking cloudy orange farmhouse beer with a beautiful nose and a lip-smacking taste. It did begin to lose a chunk of its bite in the final third, but this beer would be a great accompaniment to a warm afternoon in the sun, assuming of course you aren’t in the middle of an apocalypse.

Talking of which it would be rude not to finish the tale of John Nelson Darby, who having given up his missionary work and translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into English, German and French eventually retired to Bournemouth in the UK (well who doesn’t these days?) and eventually died at the ripe old age of 82, no doubt completely oblivious to the beer which would one day be brewed in his honour.

If you still believe in Father Christmas, as well as little elves, goblins and gnomes then please look away now. In fact I would suggest immersing yourself in the fairy tale of La Chouffe (#168) rather than reading on any further. I had previously written that La Chouffe beer was once made by gnomes from golden nectar that flowed from a sacred spring, however I wish to make it clear that this is categorically not the case.

I realise this may come as something of a shock to many regular readers and beer aficionados, but the story of the gnomes is just a cruel marketing ploy by the brewers at Achouffe to lure small bearded men in bright clothing to drink their beers. Not long after the brothers-in-law Chris Bauweraerts and Pierre Gobron had set up their hobby-cum-brewery, Chris had spotted the logo of a dwarf on a painting used by a local charity to raise money for victims of a storm. The image had such an effect on him that the very next day the brothers were conducting a business meeting to discuss using a similar design for their beer label. The fact that Chouffe is Wallonian dialect for a gnome or dwarf, and is almost identical to the spelling of the place where the beer was brewed, was in fact just a brilliant coincidence.

Pierre commissioned a work colleagues daughter to knock up a drawing for them, and the rest just fell into place, with the brothers then able to conduct a fantastical fairy tale, set amongst the idyllic Ardennes countryside. The whole thing was a perfect marketeers dream – even the valley where the brewery sits is known locally as the Vallee des Fees, (the Valley of the Fairies).

Nobody would surely though deny these gentlemen this slight twisting of the truth. What started as a hobby when Gobron quit his day job in 1982 was big enough in cash and potential to lure Duvel Moortgat to invest heavily in the venture in 2006, therefore continuing to safeguard the very future of the brewery. It is a massive success story

I finished my night in the Rake with the breweries winter offering – the unfiltered N’Ice Chouffe on cask, which turned out to be another fine brew. A malty thick soup of spicy cheer, that bulged in your mouth with every swill. The flavours are imparted through the addition of thyme and curacao, although by this stage of the evening I was far too busy lamenting the fact that the elves of Achouffe do not exist to bother with the finer details of the beer.

The claim to fame often laid at the feet of the Flemish oud-bruin Vichtenaar, is that it is the family favourite. This isn’t just any old family either, when you consider that since 1817, the Verhaeghe clan have been brewing in this area of West Flanders. Even now they dominate the local culture and own approximately 15 pubs and bars in the local area.

The name of the beer is in reference to the tiny village of Vichte, which has been the home to the brewing operations since 1875. Before this, the Verhaeghe’s were holed up in the village of Kuurne. The present owner of the brewery is Karl Verhaeghe and he is extremely keen to keep the family traditions running. It was his great-grandfather who started things off at the brewery in Vichte, armed with his own maltery and copper brew-kettles. These were removed by the Germans during World War I, when Paul refused to brew for the occupants, and the maltery has long since been closed, but much else remains the same – this includes many of the large oak casks, and the koelschip, although this is no longer used.

Paul Verhaeghe carried on the running of the brewery until 1928 when he handed it over to his two sons, Leon and Victor. It would then be another 44 years until they handed over to their sons, Jacque and Pierre. I just love the way that this arrangement is still present in so many breweries in Belgium. This isn’t just a nostalgic look at the way breweries used to be; this is real life, and this is a proper brewery. Beers like Vichtenaar win prizes and turn heads.

The brewing and fermentation process for Vichtenaar is virtually the same as the Duchesse de Bourgogne (#105), except that the beer remains unblended. It is aged in oak casks for eight months and then simply bottled. The result is a typical sour red-brown ale which tantalises the tastebuds. There isn’t a great deal of difference between the two but I would venture that the Vichtenaar is somewhat sweeter, although without the two together it’s hard to compare. I will save that for another night.

Beer experts tend to say that if you want to try a beer that tastes like Hoegaarden (#81) used to then there is no better exponent than the St. Bernardus Wit. This comes as no surprise as the beer was actually developed in co-operation with Pierre Celis, who of course was the mastermind behind the success of Hoegaarden. The main difference is that the St. Bernardus gets the traditional Belgian secondary fermentation in the bottle which just adds to the steely quality.

The term wheat beer is something of a misnomer, as these beers are not made 100% from wheat – in fact probably only about 30-40% of the mash. The rest is more likely to contain forms of pilsener malt. It is this 30-40% though which gives the wheat beers their hazy milky glow, which in turn has tended to coin the appellation ‘white beer’. Hops are generally used less frequently as they tend to impair flavour, and brewers such as Celis have traditionally been more subtle with spices such as coriander, or fruit – most commonly the peel of an orange.

It is surprising that white beers are not more common in Belgium as wheat tends to be in greater abundance than barley and is therefore cheaper to produce. Wheat beers tend though to be somewhat lower in strength than dubbels, tripels and typical Belgian ales, which may go some way to explain why these beers are more popular in Germany or the USA. Others argue that wheat tends to clog up the brewers equipment and is therefore more painful to brew due to the rigours of keeping the kit clean and free from infection.

Either way I’m not really a wheat beer man, or I wasn’t until I tried the St. Bernardus Wit. It was altogether more robust, with extra colour and fizz, and it was both crisp and sharp with a flavour that actually challenged your taste-buds. I could actually taste the hints of orange peel and coriander which is saying something. I think this is best suited to a warm summers day in Flanders, but all in all a pretty impressive way to bring up the hundredth beer!

Everybody has heard of Hoegaarden – certainly since Interbrew exported it around the world. In terms of white/wheat beers there are probably none more famous. The beer gets it name from the town in which it is brewed, and although it is brewed to a traditional recipe that dates back to 1445, this actual beer has only existed since 1966.

The original wheat beer recipe was largely engineered by the monks of Hoegaarden in the middle ages, where they had access to spices such as coriander and curacao due to the Dutch trading influence. So successful was the result, that at one point there were over 30 independent small farmhouse breweries in the tiny town – although by 1957 there were none left! The rise in popularity of mass-produced lager and the asset-stripping that occurred during both world wars had taken its toll on this cottage industry.

In 1966 however, a local milkman with a fond nostalgia for the older white beers decided to reinvent the style. He set up de Kluis (the Cloister) brewery with a few close friends and the rest is history as they say. We have already met this milkman Pierre Celis (#20, #21), and doubtless we will again.

His white beer was a remarkable success over the next twenty or so years, with production growing from 350 hectolitres in 1966 to 75,000 in 1985. Sadly the Hoegaarden plant was completely destroyed by a terrible fire in this year, and Celis was forced to take extra investment from Interbrew, who inevitably were able to influence a take-over of the brewery in 1987. The amount of hectolitres produced would rise to 855,000 over the next ten years, but by then the standard of the beer had fallen sharply. The fact was that by now Hoegaarden was a worldwide commodity, and most people drinking it on a warm summers afternoon had no concept of what this beer once was. The final knife in the back came in 2005, when AB/InBev, who by now had taken over Interbrew, decided to move all production to Jupille, near Liege. Suddenly Hoegaarden was merely a brand, and the village just a memory. Such an outcry followed for the next couple of years that in 2007 brewing returned to Hoegaarden, but sadly the quality has never returned.

I had clearly tried Hoegaarden on and off over the years, but this was the first wheat beer to pass my lips on the Belgian Beer Odyssey. I had brought back a 250 ml bottle from a jaunt to Belgium, and thus was not drinking it from its traditional hexagonal glass*, however it really didn’t taste as I remembered it to be on those warm summer afternoons. Traditional Hoegaarden was famous for being unfiltered, but this was almost translucent, and much too gassy. It looked anaemic and to be fair, if there is still coriander and curacao in this, then it has long since been tastable on my palate. I am not going to bad-mouth the name, because the Hoegaarden Grand Cru is still a mighty fine beer, but this one remains a lesson to us all that we should stand up for the little men amongst the craft breweries of Belgium.

* Did you know? – that the traditional hexagonal glass was supposedly designed to be prised out of ruined drinkers hands at the end of a long night by a spanner.

I had decided to tarry a while longer in the Dovetail, and having been so mightily impressed with the Grand Cru (#20), decided to partake in the darker sister beer – the Hoegaarden Forbidden Fruit, or in more guttural Flemish ‘Verboden Vrucht’. It is even given the term ‘Le Fruit Defendu’ for the French speakers of the region. Big brother marketing.

Again, it is the label that sparks debate and tells the story of the name of the beer, and closer inspection reveals a comedy-take on Peter Paul Ruben’s painting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Pierre Celis had brewed the beer originally as an offering for the Diesters company to celebrate an event in the town of Diest. Due to a disagreement over the use of the name Diest by the townspeople, Celis decided to call his beer ‘Forbidden’, and thus the evolution of the forbidden fruit theme in the story and painting of Eden.

It doesn’t end there however, in that when Celis took the beer for export to the US, it was very quickly banned as it infringed their strict policies on nudity. The brewery were quick to counter that this was not pornography, “but a great work of art from our country”, to which the American Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms replied “Yes, but Adam should be handing her an apple – not a beer.”

Don’t you love the Americans? Well Pierre Celis was clearly not put off because in recent years he now lives in the US brewing very popular proper white beers. This beer though was far from white – the head was piebald and cookie coloured, and the undercurrent a dark writhing mass. She tasted particularly smooth and chocolately with a definite dark cocoa finish. It never went on to throttle the tastebuds but all in all I couldn’t complain too much. Now I really needed to eat !

Hoegaarden is reknowned for it’s plain wheat beer, which is something of a shame as it is a common concern of many beer fans today, that the quality of Hoegaarden (#81) has declined since it was taken over by AB/InBev. I would rather tackle that issue another time, as in actual fact, the Hoegaarden Grand Cru, which I painstakingly selected from the bar menu of the Dovetail in Clerkenwell was a much too pleasant beer to be negative about.

I was interested in the concept of Grand Cru. What on earth are they talking about? I must admit I had only heard this term largely used by winemakers, where it generally referred to the specific growth-place of a wine, intimating a region more so than a particular vineyard. The addition of ‘Grand Cru’ is a suggestion that this beverage is indeed a special one of this variation – the ‘great growth’. The term ‘Grand Cru’ can often be associated with foods, spirits and beers, but it doesn’t hold such an obvious official meaning, in that there is no regulation of what is or isn’t a ‘great growth’ beer. Pierre Celis, who invented the Hoegaarden Grand Cru, clearly felt this was his premier beer, and even went so far to use a Grand Cru wine label as the label for his new beer. His revelation in his autobiography ended much speculation that the mansion on the cover had some particular relevance to him – it was actually just a wine label he had happened to come across.

The beer itself was fantastic. A good solid head and a creamy dense mass underneath swimming in a sea of rich sediment. It felt alive. The taste is sweet and meaty and reeling with deep inner strength. I hadn’t eaten, and didn’t need to after this. I had good company in the bar, but noted quietly to myself that this was definitely a good one to look out for when restocking the cellar. Definitely some great growth in this one!

(Post-Script) – I was so impressed with this beer that I followed it, not with food, but a Hoegaarden Forbidden Fruit (#21).